


2.5YR4/8

by a_walking_shadow



Category: Bernice Summerfield (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Archaeology, Gen, except it's happening on Mars, so idk what I'm talking about, written by an archaeology student
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 14:00:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18701035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_walking_shadow/pseuds/a_walking_shadow
Summary: The archaeology department at St Oscars' runs a field school on Mars. Bernice Summerfield leads an expedition, which encounters the normal archaeological problems.





	2.5YR4/8

‘Red.’

‘Yeah, looks like it to me.’

The students glance at each other, then at the soil, then the context sheet, then the soil again.

‘There’s a lot of red here, isn’t there?’ the girl asks, not making any move to actually write anything down.

Her partner scowls, and rolls their eyes. ‘We’re on Mars’, they say, tiredly. ‘Of course it’s red. I’d be worried if our soil colour was anything _other_ than red.’

‘What’s this about red?’ a new voice asks, and they both jump. Benny grins slightly, and crouches down next to them.

It’s day three of the most ambitious student dig the archaeology department at the University of Dellah runs.  
Day one was spent going through the kinds of absurd safety briefings one must go through if one is attempting to work on a site on a planet without a breathable atmosphere, and therefore needs everyone to be confident in their spacesuits before they leave the airlock each morning. (Projects on Mars were great, except for the logistical challenges. And the risk of angering the Martians for disturbing burials. Especially that one, actually. Angry ice warriors were never a good thing, especially with students involved. Benny had only been able to get this dig approved by swearing on her credentials, credit card, and life, that there was absolutely no precedent for warrior burials within settlements like what they were going to excavate, and that at the first sign of exoskeleton they’d be headed back out into orbit.)  
Day two was spent setting up the site, although Benny and a few others had come through a few weeks earlier to set up preliminary markers, so it was mostly spent scraping the latest layer of red dust off the surface. Archaeology really is just about making a big mess and then cleaning it up very, very slowly.  
Day three, and they’re finally ready to put their trowels in the ground. Or rather, they will be, once they’ve got context sheets drawn up for everything on the surface.

‘We’re trying to work out soil colour’, explains one of the students. She shifts slightly, clearly uncomfortable in her spacesuit but not wanting to admit it this early on in the day. Benny, for her part, crouches down in the dust with the practised ease of someone who’s spent a very long time working in conditions like this. ‘Right’, she says. ‘I hate to say it, but “red” probably isn’t going to cut it. Have you got a Munsell chart?’

The other student shakes their head. ‘Ran out.’

‘Well then.’ Benny picks up a handful of dirt, running it through gloved fingers. It’s very red. ‘Not to worry! We’ll do it by eye, in that case.’ Somehow, the slightly tinny aspect of her voice from the spacesuit comms just makes her seem even more impossibly cheerful. ‘You’ll need a hue and a colour, just so we don’t call this entire site “red”. What’re you thinking?’

There’s a moment of silence. To Benny, it’s the overly familiar feeling of a lecture hall full of students studiously examining the hair of the person in front of them, or the paintwork, or their fingernails, or anything that might just mean she won’t ask them a question. Well. Tough luck.

‘Lauren?’ she asks, and takes a great deal of delight in the “oh shit, she knows who I am” look that passes over the girls’ face.

‘reddish red?’ she offers, dubiously.

Her partner (Kai, Benny thinks, assuming she’s remembering the enrolment list right) nods, quickly, the movement turning into a full-body up-and-down motion by the time it’s filtered through their spacesuit.

‘Come on. A bit more creativity?’

There is another pause, this one tinged slightly with disbelief. ‘I don’t think it can be anything else.’

‘Oh, sure it is. What about brownish red? Or maybe even reddish brown? Compare it to that bit, over there. Now that’s what I’d call an orangish red, but this one’s completely different.’

‘… is it?’

‘Well.’ Benny pauses, glancing up and across the site. There are students scattered in groups of two or three all across it, and a couple of her colleagues moving amongst them.

Other than the people, the entire horizon is red.

‘I’m sure you’ll get your eye in eventually’, she says, with as much reassurance as she can muster, and then drags herself back onto her feet, and heads for the next group.

The two students exchange another glance, and then, reluctantly, Lauren writes “BROWNISH RED” in the “colour” section of their context sheet.

 

* * *

 

‘Onto composition, then?’ Benny asks, the next time she comes around. She really is far too cheerful for this. Kai nods, and shows her the context sheet, which now specifies the composition as “SILTY SILT”. She tilts her head, slightly, and both students scowl.

‘Oh, don’t tell me we have to say this is clayey silt or something,’ they groan. They’ve found, over the course of the day, that by far the worst thing about their spacesuit is the comms unit. Oh, sure, not being able to go to the bathroom without getting help escaping is annoying beyond belief, and attempting to either write or wield a trowel with the gloves is patently ridiculous. But by far the worst bit is their inability to properly convey their frustration to everyone else, with the way the suit messes with their tone. ‘It’s way too silty. It’s nothing but silt. No clay, no sand. Just silt.’

Benny, for her part, just shrugs. ‘Yeah, I know. Just call it silt. Don’t bother with the silty prefix. If you want to be really formal, write “100%” after it.’

 

* * *

 

 

‘Hey, uh, Benny?’ Lauren asks, frowning through her helmet (stained red by the dust, but maybe actually a nice reddish pink with the angle of the light), at the (greyish red) silt with stone inclusions beside her. ‘I think I might have something.’

Benny lopes over to her, positioning herself carefully so that she can see the cut. In doing so, she stomps right over Kai’s recently cleaned section. Lauren’s pretty sure that if they weren’t literally in spacesuits right now, Benny would have just been stabbed with a trowel. Ignoring the glare digging into the back of her skull (Goddess, it’s not like she TOLD her professor to come marching over here without looking where she was stepping), she reaches out and taps part of the outcrop with the tip of her pencil.

‘I don’t really know what it is’, Lauren says. ‘I thought it was a rock, at first, except-’

‘The fracture pattern’s all wrong’, Benny murmurs. She kneels down (inadvertently disturbing yet another part of Kai’s clean section), and starts jiggling at the object with the tip of her trowel. After a moment, it comes out, and Benny catches it in her other hand with practised ease, holding it up. ‘conchoidal fracture. Bulbs of percussion- here, and here, look. If I didn’t know better I’d say it had been worked.’

‘Did the ice warriors use stone tools?’ Kai asks, and Lauren sends mental thanks that they asked the stupidly obvious question. Benny is too engrossed in the object to pay attention, for a moment.

‘That’s not a rock’, Benny mutters. ‘Bugger.’

Then she stabs the spot in the section it had come out of with surprising force, leaving her trowel embedded to mark the place. ‘Small find it’, she tells Lauren. ‘I’m going to take it inside, have a closer look. And let me know if you come up with any more.’ She scrambles upwards, then steps back, considering the section as a whole.

‘Stratigraphy’s no good here, is it?’ she says. ‘All jumbled up. Ah well.’ With that, she turns on her heel and heads for the ship.

Kai glares at the trail of footprints left behind with something approaching fury, and grudgingly scrambles back to the edge of their context to start cleaning all over again. Lauren claps them on the shoulder, gently, as she heads off in search of the small finds register and survey equipment.

 

* * *

 

‘What is it?’ Lauren asks her, once they’re back in the ship that evening. Benny is sprawled in one corner of the living quarters, beer in one hand, the find from earlier- now properly bagged and numbered- resting in the other.

‘I’m not really sure’, Benny says. And then she sighs. ‘Or rather, I am sure, I just don’t want to be.’

‘… Why?’

‘Because the faculty dean said that at the first hint of an exoskeleton, we were to abandon the site and head back into orbit.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. Oh.’ Benny scowls, and takes a swig of her drink. Her eyes still don’t leave the scale- for that is, undoubtedly, what the object is. A scale from an ice warrior.

‘It makes no sense though’, she grumbles. ‘Everything we know about Martian culture- literally everything- says they wouldn’t have burials inside of their agricultural hubs. And that’s definitely where we are. There’s no tomb here, there _can’t_ be.’

Lauren says nothing, just stares at the object in her professor’s hand and wonders vaguely if they’re all going to die because of the shiny black thing she pulled out of a wall.

‘Unless, of course, it’s not from a tomb at all’, Benny says. ‘Could just have fallen off. If ice warrior scales _can_ fall off, that is. People lose stuff all the time- bits of clothing, buckles, jewellery. Hell, most of the best finds you’ll get will come out of either landfill or the drainage ditch, just from people dropping stuff. It stands to reason that Martians would lose stuff too.’

With a determined nod, Benny drops the find back with the others, and heads in search of more alcohol.

 

* * *

 

** Several days later **

‘Let me guess’, Benny says, when Kai comes to deliver her yet another context sheet to enter into the computer. ‘You have a well-sorted, well-rounded sediment which is almost if not entirely composed of silt, falling somewhere between reddish brown and brownish red.’

‘Nope!’, they reply, with false cheerfulness. ‘This one’s a pinkish orange.’

She perks up. ‘Ooh, really?’

‘Yeah, no. But we’re calling it that anyway.’

‘Why not’, she grumbles. ‘Variety’ll be nice. Anything else interesting?’

They shake their head, then pause. ‘Well, I didn’t fill in the “conditions” bit. I think you already know to write “excavated under dry conditions” by now.’

Benny just nods, taking the sheet distractedly, and pulling up a new page on her screen.

‘Oh, and Lauren found something’, they add. ‘Black and shiny, like the last one? Except it looked like there were more of them?’

‘Bugger’, Benny says. They she stops. ‘Why is it that the big things always happen in the last day or two? We never get anything exciting until we’re running out of time.’

Kai follows her to the airlock doors, watching as she tugs her gloves back on and reconnects the helmet and oxygen tank. Their professor is undoubtedly very good at this whole spacesuit thing. Probably better than any academic has any right to be, but then again, Professor Summerfield had always been a source of bizarre rumours.

No sooner has the airlock opened than Benny starts to jog across the site, or as close to jogging as is possible while wearing a spacesuit and operating in Martian gravity. Kai struggles to keep up, shuffling along the ancient road surface their classmates have been uncovering before ducking around behind the mound they’ve been working on.

Benny is already crouched at the base of the section, Lauren hovering anxiously over her shoulder. Sure enough, there are a handful of strange, black pieces, just beginning to poke out of the section wall. Their professor scrapes at the dust around them, wielding her trowel with practised ease and a great deal more confidence in terms of direction and forcefulness than either they or Lauren would be willing to risk.

Within seconds, the fragments begin to reveal themselves into the shape of an ice warrior hand.

For all that she clearly knew what she was going to find, Benny still looks about ready to murder somebody. Quite possibly the owner of the body now ruining her well-laid excavation plans.

She heaves a sigh, then turns back towards them. ‘You two, go help your classmates tidy up in the north’, she says. ‘I’ll see what I can do here. Our best bet is probably to rebury him, hopefully without waking him up. If he’s… wakeable, that is.’

Kai swallows, and nods, and tries not to think too hard about the fact that the wall they’ve been digging into was apparently sitting on top of someone potentially still alive.

They’re pretty sure the old Earth archaeologists never had to deal with anything like this.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 2.5YR4/8 is a Munsell soil colour code for a particular shade of red. It seemed appropriate as a title. 
> 
> So, obviously I've never dug stuff up on Mars. And I haven't encountered human remains yet, let alone the remains of someone who could potentially be still alive.  
> However:  
> -the discussion about colour comes directly from a dig I was on, where we weren't allowed to classify anything as either "brownish brown" or "greyish grey", and as such got some very creative descriptions including my personal favourite yellowish blue silty clay (90% clay). (It was clay, and it was grey.)  
> -many threats were made about stabbing people with trowels, whenever they walked over something you had cleaned. Which happened all the time. Unfortunately, the worst person by far was one of the academics in charge of the dig, and it wasn't like we could threat to stab HIM.  
> \- Benny's horror at the scale reflects our horror at finding hobnails, which are little bits of metal Romans used to hold their shoes together. We got 7 shoes over our dig, and in each case the leather had rotted away leaving in some cases HUNDREDS of little bits of metal which we needed to record individually. Finding one hobnail soon became a terrifying experience, and finding more than one in the same area was like something from a horror movie.  
> \- right at the end of the dig, we got a waterlogged deposit, which turned into a well, with wicker lined walls which were still preserved, and bits of leather which need a lot of special work to keep them preserved. Which was brilliant! But would have really been better if it showed up a week earlier and we actually had time to deal with it properly. 
> 
> So, yeah. Although I've never worked on Mars, I'm pretty sure these are the kinds of problems Benny would encounter.


End file.
